It’s three months on from Starmer’s brutal suspension of the seven Labour MPs who voted for the SNP’s amendment on the two child benefit cap. Until they are let back into the party – which may take some time judging by previous experience – they are independent MPs…
Some of them just can’t get over losing Starmer’s warm embrace. They’re still pretending to be Labour MPs on Twitter…
Richard Burgon, Zarah Sultana, and John McDonnell all still have Labour in their bios. The rest have removed all mention of their old party. The onetime Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Justice Secretary might need a stern word from their former employer…
A Welsh co-conspirator has been in touch following Guido’s series on the upcoming class-action wave set to sweep into British businesses under Labour. Welsh Labour First Minister, Vaughan Gething, and Jo Stevens, the Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, both spent significant portions of their working career at the same claimant law firm: Thompsons Solicitors. You can guarantee if the two most senior Tory politicians had worked in the same class action firm, The Guardian would be filing a story about a web of intrigue by now…
Thompsons, a self-described “campaigning” law firm – who never act on behalf of employers or insurers – have donated more than £200,000 to Labour and its candidates since 2001. They also claim to have “invented the class action” lawsuit, pioneering it as a form of “fast and aggressive legal action.” The firm also counts hard-left MPs Richard Burgon and Andy McDonald amongst its former employees, alongside Labour’s Deputy Campaign Co-ordinator and sister of the Shadow Chancellor, Ellie Reeves. Well connected…
Thompsons might be the latest class action firm connected to Labour, but they’re certainly not the first – as Guido has revealed with its reporting on Pogust Goodhead. With British business under threat in Starmer’s lawfare Britain, it’s no wonder lobbying firms are scrambling to hire as many Labour researchers as possible. More bad news for Tory SpAds…
Member of Labour’s National Executive Committee Mish Rahman said at a “Stand Up to Racism” fringe event in Liverpool that Suella Braverman was on a “personal driven mission to be the most racist brown person” in the country and that she is the “most far-right home secretary” ever. Rahman supports Corbyn’s membership of Labour and argued that Diane Abbott only wanted “a fair hearing” when she claimed that the party investigation into her was racist. Rahman gets to vote on the strategic direction of the party…
The Corbynite love-in also included Bell Ribeiro-Addy who said that Sunak’s “entire election campaign is going to be based on racism” and Richard Burgon, who added that the Tories are “hurtling into far-right territory”. A party transformed…
The scenes coming out of China are shocking. Last night’s arrest and beating of a BBC journalist covering the protests against the Beijing Communist regime’s Zero Covid strategy have finally brought the plight of the Chinese into Britain’s political discourse. In light of this, Guido thought it worth going back a couple of years and remembering all the hardline Covid loons who spent much of the pandemic calling for the same Zero Covid strategy here in Britain.
In February 2021, 47 MPs signed an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling on the UK Government to “urgently to adopt a Zero Covid plan that seeks the maximum suppression of the virus”. The EDM cited New Zealand and Vietnam as specific examples. Vietnam eventually reported the world’s 13th-highest death toll…
Supporters of the EDM included the usual hard Left figures, such as Richard Burgon, Diane Abbott, Zarah Sultana, Claudia Webbe, John McDonnell, Apsana Begum and Rebecca Long-Bailey. It also saw a whopping number of SNP MPs back it, unsurprising given Nicola Sturgeon spent much of the first half of the pandemic giving lip service to a Zero Covid strategy, egged on by her top advisor Devi Sridhar.
It wasn’t just left-wing figures, of course. Jeremy Hunt lauded the strategy and recounted with barely suppressed admiration his sister’s experience of flying into Beijing during the pandemic. She was, he said, escorted from the airport by government officials and physically sealed in her home to remain under surveillance from Communist police.
Attacking Zero Covid strategies is not a luxury of those of us now blessed with hindsight. They were roundly attacked at the time – even discredited – and yet authoritarians still proselytised for them. This week’s scenes in China perhaps show why the hard Left loved the idea – it was less to do with virus control, more about controlling the citizenry…
Read the full list of EDM signatories here…
In December, Guido pointed out Richard Burgon had fallen victim to continually double counting when opining how to solve all of society’s problems. According to Richard, a top 10% wealth tax would raise £69 billion, which he would spend on, amongst other things: creating a ‘Social Emergency Fund’, ending the cost of living crisis, end people going cold, end hunger, cost future vaccine rollouts, pay for 150 new hospitals, eradicate homelessness, give nurses a “proper pay rise”, increase Universal Credit by £20 and invest in social care. Among other things…
It now seems it’s not just Guido poo-pooing this Burgon’s one-stop fiscal magic wand. Fellow lefty loon Howard Beckett, of Unite fame, yesterday tweeted that taxing the wealth of the UK’s billionaires at 3% would raise almost £60 billion – just £9 billion less than Burgon’s 10% wealth raid.
There are 171 billionaires in the UK with a total wealth of £560bl. Taxing their wealth over £10ml at just 3% would raise almost £60bl.
— Howard Beckett (@BeckettUnite) March 24, 2022
Stop the tax increases on workers. Tax the billionaires.
Aside from all this being based on the presumption that billionaires will just stay and fill in their HMRC returns, rather than sail off to Monaco aboard their yachts, that’s a huge difference. Guido won’t labour the discrepancy too much, though perhaps they should get Diane to have a look over their fag packet calculations…
Guido’s spotted that every time a political issue is raised, Richard Burgon pops up with the same, supposedly perfect solution: a “top 10% wealth tax” that would, according to Burgon, raise £69 billion. This may sound like a hefty sum, although given the near endless list of things Burgon wants it spent on, it may not stretch as far as he’d like…
Today, Burgon suggests it would be a great way to solve future vaccine schemes. Just two weeks ago, he said it could be used to build 150 hospitals. In September, he wrote an entire article about how it should be used to fund a new National Care Service. Of course, if he chose any of these options, he’d have to deny the NHS workers a pay rise he promised the wealth tax could fund back in July…
Based on a tweet search, Guido sums Burgon’s called to spend this exact sum of tax money on 19 political projects. As a wise man once said, Burgon’s useless, Burgon’s rubbish, Burgon doesn’t know what he’s doing…
